Globalization from below: toward a democratic global commonwealth

This essay presents a model of the structures and processes of the modern world-system and proposes a project to transform the system into a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth. Popular transnational social movements are challenging the ideological hegemony of corporate capitalism. The global women's movement, the labor movement, environmentalists and in- digenous movements are attempting to form strong alliances that can chal- lenge the domination of an emerging transnational capitalist class. This essay argues that new democratic socialist states in the semiperiphery will be crucial allies and sources of support for the antisystemic movements. tion, semiperipheral development. The world-systems perspective is an historical and structural theoretical framework that analyses national societies as parts of a larger stratified socio-political and economic system (Shannon 1996). The focus is on the structural features of the larger system itself - a global political economy with an international hierarchy of national states and a global class system. There are economically and militarily powerful countries in the core, dependent and dominated regions in the periphery, and a middle sector of countries (the semiperiphery) in which national states have intermediate levels of economic and political/military power. The world market includes both international trade and all the national economies, so the world-system is the whole system, not just international relations among national states. Local, regional, national, international, transnational and global networks of interaction constitute the world-system. This set of nested and overlapping networks of human interaction is itself located in the biosphere and the physical regimes of the planet Earth, the solar system, our galaxy and the larger processes and structures of the physical universe. The world-systems perspective is both materialist and institutional. It analyses the evolution of human institutions while taking account of the constraints and opportunities posed by physics, biology and the natural environment (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). The modern world-system is a global set of interaction networks that include all the national societies. But world-systems have not always been global. The modern world-system originated out of an expanding multi-core Afroeurasian world-system in which the Europeans rose to hegemony by conquering the Americas and using the spoils to overcome the political and economic strengths of contending core regions in South and East Asia (Frank 1998). The result was a global world-system with a single core